Twitter's Vine Revives 1890s Magic Movies

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A spool of thread changes color as it dances on its own across a
table. A mystery woman snaps her fingers in front of a glass of
water and the glass disappears. Is it magic? No, it's the "magic"
hashtag on Vine, a new app from Twitter that allows users to
easily make and upload six-second videos.

To make
a Vine video, users record several short clips that the app
then stitches together automatically. The app provides an ideal
format for simple magic tricks. But virtually all of these tricks
are so obvious that the videos are clearly more about making
funny and old-fashioned clips than creating illusions.

And old-fashioned they are. The videos use the same techniques as
some of the short "magic" clips that people recorded at the
beginning of film's history. Stitching together before-and-after
shots helped Thomas Edison create the illusion of chopping off an
actress' head in his one-minute, 1893 movie, "The Execution of
Mary Queen of Scots."

Georges Méliès, a French stage magician and filmmaker, used
that technique and developed others for the short magic movies he
made from 1895 until the early nineteen-teens. In fact, Méliès
pioneered special
effects techniques far beyond anything Vine users are
likely to tackle. For instance, covering half of the screen while
filming allowed him to later put together two "halves" to create
the illusion of two copies of the same actor appearing in the
same scene.

A regular Vine user might be able to recreate some of Méliès'
"Illusions fantamagoriques," however.

Here at TechNewsDaily, we noticed some of Vine's younger users
have put together the most Méliès-like clips. If you have the
Vine app, we suggest the work of the user "Max Michalsky," who
doesn't appear to have graduated high school yet.

Inspired by Michalsky, we made our own magic clip using Vine, in
which a cup (which we cut into sections) appears to rise out of a
table as we hold a hand over it.